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I've scoured the web, but I'm sick of reading "scan your computer for viruses" and "upgrade your RAM" on answers to similar questions to this. I understand that dwm.exe is for (simply put) caching bitmaps for things like Aero-peek and similar, but as far as I have read it shouldn't be using vast amounts of memory.
My colleague and I both have 4GB of RAM, Core 2 Duo, blah, blah -- essentially they're pretty capable. His dwm.exe is running at around 30mb, mine is currently running at about half a gig, though it does fluctuate quite a lot. This is the same while running the exact same applications (currently Zend studio, FireFox (with firemin - low memory usage), Outlook). Every so often I will get a notification asking me if I want to switch to Aero Basic because it's using too much memory, and sometimes it will just switch itself to basic and let me know why.
I know it's possible to stop it switching, but I want to know why it is using too much memory otherwise it's just papering over the cracks.
One thing to add is this seems to have started after a robbery on Monday, where two of my monitors were stolen, and I had to temporarily use a couple of alternative monitors. I am now using brand new monitors but the problem is the same. All drivers installed and working seemingly fine.
Any ideas why the usage is so high?
We are using windows 7 64-bit Professional.
Can you get any clues from Proccess Monitor? – jmreicha – 2012-05-25T14:54:58.223
What kind of information would you regard as a clue in Process Monitor? Sorry, not used it a whole lot. – Leonard Challis – 2012-05-25T15:02:57.427
1You can drill down into the processes more and see what, if any other processes it is talking to. – jmreicha – 2012-05-25T15:45:02.360
dwm.exe doesn't actually seem to show up in procmon...? – Leonard Challis – 2012-05-28T09:31:37.107
Yeah ProcMon can be a little hairy. How about the sysinternals tool Process Explorer? Can you find any clues with that maybe? – jmreicha – 2012-05-29T00:19:29.753
How come no info on the used Theme, visual effects enabled, number of monitors and their resolutions and whether cloned or extended, etc., etc., on the respective computers? They all would seem to be highly relevant. – kreemoweet – 2012-10-27T17:13:29.013
kreemoweet, the Theme doesn't matter (it's Aero anyway when the DWM is enabled), the transparency shader doesn't need memory, just GPU performance. – Joey – 2012-10-30T20:35:52.950
It'd be interesting to know the graphics cards used in both computers as well as how up-to-date the drivers are. E.g. if the driver doesn't support WDDM 1.1 then you'll have much higher memory usage. – Joey – 2012-10-30T20:37:15.630
0.5 GB isn't a lot fo memory! – Mikhail – 2012-10-30T21:03:36.540